I'm on travel in the UK right now - I'm filming a part for a documentary which I'll talk more about in a later post - but I want to make sure you get a chance to see this really quite fun self-portrait the Mars Curiosity rover took over the weekend:
[Click to narcissusenate.] I love how it almost looks like the rover is surprised to see itself. The picture was taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera mounted on the end of the robot arm. It's designed to look up close at specimens of rocks or whatever else the rover happens to see as it rolls across Mars. It has a transparent dust cover on it, which is why the image is a bit fuzzy. It's covered in Mars dust!
But engineers commanded the dust cover to flip open, and then it took this picture looking ...
